Mr Tickle's guide to positive thinking (Positive Thought)

Member Name: Celandine

Product:	Positive Thought
Date:	21/08/01 (317 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: this is a very silly opinion, really

Disadvantages: ditto

Don't ask. I know it's a peculiar title, but, you see, I wanted to write a book review of Mr Tickle - by Roger Hargreaves, and one of the silliest, funniest, daftest books I read, and giggled at, as a child, and I also wanted to write something on 'positive thinking', whatever that may be.

So I'm standing in the middle of this little messy kitchen. Ellie is merrily bonding with the computer which has pretty lights, hums, and she thinks it might be hungry. She's offering the CD rom drive a bit of apple, just to make sure, anyway. Dinner is sort of being made, in a bit of a haphazard way, and I'm juggling Roger Hargreaves with the blueberries for the muffins, and watching to see if our computer really is hungry, and will accept the proffered apple, and if so, how?

I want extraordinary long arms, and I want to be in bed, too, with Mr Tickle, who can reach out his extraordinary long arms and take biscuits from the jar downstairs. I'm not sure that I trust self-help books, but I'm sure I read a particularly useless one years ago, and wonder if I could find it would it shed any light on positive thinking, at all?

I'm not sure I trust 'positive thinking' you see. It smacks of all those dreadful books which tell you how to make friends and influence people, and keep making little quasi clever remarks about how you, too, can become a size 8, make shed-loads of money, the perfect cake, and improve your memory, simply by reading something. I'd rather read, oh, almost anything, even a back of a cereal packet, than a self-help book. But I've not got one, I've got Mr Tickle, who by now is awake, setting off through the wood, having made his bed, and he's looking for someone to tickle: "Looking for anyone to tickle", in fact.

Dooyoo already has some extraordinary good ops in this category, too. Johndmr and Peel.rebekah's. I love those. Full of fantastic advice, and t
ips, and helpfulness, and everything. Not like Mr Tickle at all, who's just seen a teacher writing on a blackboard, and is about to do something really, really naughty.

I like the idea of positive thinking, though. I like the glass being half-full, rather than half-empty. I like the way that if you do things when they arise, you don't end up with loads and loads of stuff to do, a mountain, in one big lump. I used to shove all my bills under the bed, and ignore them, until I realised that organising your finances was less to do with piling everything in a heap, and if I actually rang my bank manager, he was usually quite nice. Some things can't be made positive though. Some things are just negative through and through, and however hard you excercise, and force yourself to look on the bright side, you still end up feeling as if you've been hit by a big black emotional sledgehammer, and if you don't crawl under a rock for about a year you might get hit by it again.

Sometimes thinking, all by itself, is negative. Sometimes the only way to make a situation better is to go out and do something, if you can. There's all sorts of tricks, and dodges, you can use to stop yourself falling into a heap, but sometimes they just don't work. I make things. When I'm feeling really low, I make cards to send to friends, or embroider something, or bash hell out of a lump of dough. You get something physical at the end of this, you see. Even if the bread sinks, you've still 'made bread', and even if the drawing is lousy, you've still got a card to send.

Mr Tickle? Well, he tickles, I suppose. He's about to tickle, at this very moment, in my kitchen:

He "grinned a mischievous grin", waited another minute, "and then tickled the teacher again.

This time he kept on tickling until soon the teacher was laughing out loud and saying,"Stop it! Stop it!" over and over again.


All the children were laughing too at such a funny sight.

There was a terrible pandemonium".

There's pandemonium in my house, too, but it's a bit more grammatically correct - oh, and the apple gift has been gratefully accepted by the CD drive, so lets just hope it'll be regurgitated soon.

I'm making the blueberry muffins because one of my best friends in the whole world is coming up this weekend, and she's really miserable, and needs a bit of a break. We're going to go out and pick elderberries, to make jam, and we're going to picnic in the middle of a field, and drink too much white wine in the evening. Hopefully she'll be talking about it all, too. It's when you bottle things up, I think, that situations can get really dire. When you ingore your own feelings, and all the displaced emotions well up and tweak out of you in the wrong places, like toothpaste escaping from little holes in the side of the tube, when you squeeze it, and making a nasty mess all over the bathroom.

I think self-help positive thinking is probably throwing away the whole tube, and brushing your teeth with a different polish. but I reckon the really positive thing to do might be to channel all that energy into making something, or writing something, or going somewhere, or just picking up the phone and yelling at the bank manager. You, at the end of the day, can't change who you are, you just have to accept it, and make the best of it, and learn how to compromise with yourself with all the things you aren't very good at.

Mr Tickle doesn't really have to worry about that. He's only really good at one thing, and that's tickling. That's what he does, even if he's just caused a traffic jam, by tickling a policeman (make jam instead, it's better for you, honestly). Oooh, now he's tickled a grocer who was piling up apples, and all you can see are the grocer's shoes,
sticking out of a pile of green circles, that actually look like peas.

Roger Hargreaves illustrations are basic, you see, to say the very least. They're all big shapes, drawn and coloured in with felt tip pens, and they're all totally without perspective, or any 'shading' so to speak of. Never mind. At least that's playing on his strengths, since the stories are a bit basic, too. What he's good at (the characters, and the silliness) is complemented by what he's bad at (drawing), so you don't really notice the fact that the apples look just like enormous peas.

He's quite good with words, as well, even if they aren't positioned in a totally grammatically correct way. He uses 'long words', exciting words, and just a few of them, but repeated. He doesn't overstrech himself, and I think he enjoyed writing this book. It's gleeful, really. If I've got to do something I hate I tend to reward myself, too, with something I like at the end of it. I write lists, as well, of all the things I have to do - but I decorate them, so it looks fun, at least. Oh, enliven life by using the odd long misplaced word sometimes. Otherwise things just get dull, and grey (Mr Tickle is bright orange).

He's having a lovely day, is Mr Tickle. He's tickled a station guard (making the train late, and all the passengers furious), the doctor, the butcher, and the postman. Mr Tickle is really, really naughty, you know.

I'm not. I'm a good girl. I'm making my muffins, and doing the washing, and reading a nice worthy book, except that Mr Tickle keeps getting in the way, oh, and the house is a tip, and I've four million things to do (all beautifully decorated), on the wall, and what I really, really should do this afternoon is finish a picture, and make telephone calls, and what I'm going to do is bop around the garden, and email lots of people that I like. Well, that's if the co
mputer hasn't got indigestion. If I do, well, six boring things, then I can do maybe six nice things afterwoods. If I get really bored, then I can always daydream.

Daydreaming is lovely, I think. If you can't escape somewhere in your head, and imagine you're somewhere completely different, while you hoover, or wash up, or go around sainsbury's, then life would be really dull. Reading helps you imagine, and reading uplifts me, sometimes, too. Laughing is the best thing of all, though.

Mr Tickle is laughing:

"Sitting in his armchair in his small house at the other side of the wood, he laughed and laughed every time he thought about all the people he'd tickled"

Tickling is his sole purpose, you see, so I don't think he needs to know what 'positive thinking' is, which is good, since I'm not sure I know either. If you're really, really down, then I don't think it helps. I'm not sure that tickling would help. Mr Tickle's extraordinary long arms can only do one thing.......they can tickle you! They might well be about to tickle you now, unless they tickle me, and I drop the blueberry muffin mixture all over Ellie, so she can post blueberries into my hungry computer. I'll laugh, I shall, I promise, because if I didn't I'd get cross, and I don't need any bread at the moment.

Lots of things make me laugh. Music can make me laugh, books can, tv programmes can, and people can. All these things can also depress me, or make me think, uplift me, and make me daydream. Being tickled makes me laugh, of course, too, but only in small doses. Maybe it's a question of balance. Trying to balance your life so that you don't just dwell on one aspect of it. You need to laugh, and love, and cry, communicate, and dream. You need to be naughty too, sometimes, just like Mr Tickle.

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